Zum Andenken An
by OnceUponAFanficx
Summary: A lonely doctor trapped in the ethically crippling Second World War recounts the life he once lived outside of the grasp of the Nazi regime and how, almost three decades later, he finally learns to open his heart to new life, love and happiness. MedicxHeavy, some fluff and some WW2 themes. An alternate origin for the Medic.


_(Hello, and welcome to my first TF2 fic! This is a very self-indulgent piece of writing, detailing the origin I imagined the Medic would have… Because I'm sick of the 'Nazi Medic' stigma he has attached to him. Anyway, I hope you enjoy, I would love to know if I should write any more origins/continue with this so if you think it's worth carrying on please tell me! I know it's a little late for a new TF2 addiction but I guess it's better to turn up late to the party than to not show up at all. Dankeschön, and enjoy!_

_Side note; I shouldn't have opted out of Modern Foreign Languages in school, my German is very limited and rusty!)_

_**Chapter One**_

_'There are so few people left in Berlin worth saving'_. His hand was shaky on the paper, his brow dripping with coagulated sweat as the frantic echoes of hurrying feet and angry, stomping boots rang through the halls of his apartment building and made him tremor softly with dread. Occasionally a loud, deep voice would call out and be answered with hysterical, terrified babbling, but usually it was just the steady monotonous click and thump of hard boots hitting rugged timber floor. The rooms on his level were being searched.

_'Yesterday, they found the family I had been hiding downstairs. The family didn't give them my name, refused to tell them it was me.'_ The words had become smears on the page now as the ink mingled in amongst the tears snaking rapidly down his cheeks and landing with a damp slap on the page. _'And to think, the daughter had Diptheria. She won't last a week in one of their camps.'_ His face contorted in pain and he began to sob violently. Outside things fell to a curious silence and the sound of heavy footsteps turned towards his apartment and began to grow louder as the men grew nearer. His apartment was supposed to be empty, he had been squatting there for some time out of sight of these demons.

_'This is my confession of suicide. If they find out it was me, that I was the doctor responsible for them… death now, at my own hands, would be a much better way…' _the sound of fists hammering on his door drew his attention upwards and his pen slipped clumsily from his hand. Hastily he fell to his knees away from his chair and scrabbled around on the floor for it, his sobs no longer contained and quiet. He found the pen and was halfway to his position at his desk when the sound of gunshots on the street outside sent him reeling backwards in surprise, and elicited startled yelps from outside the door.

He hadn't wanted this, he hadn't wanted any of this. He was only in his mid-twenties, for heaven's sake. He had only just left medical school. He still wanted to be a doctor.

The gunshots had drawn the attention of the soldiers outside the flimsy door who were filing away quickly to inspect the situation outside, though they didn't stop hurriedly discussing the need to return to his apartment when they had investigated the disturbance. As it happened one of the men the soldiers had ejected from another room had been carrying a gun and in his desperation had turned it on his captors. A number of the soldiers were taken by surprise and shot dead. The carnage left no-one thinking about the little room on the third floor with the sobbing man inside. He had escaped this time, he had been lucky.

He didn't know it though.

Having returned to his desk he remained motionless, glued to the spot. It was a long time before the sirens of an army ambulance rang from outside and he dared peek down into the street. Everyone had forgotten him for now, so caught up in the blood and gore of the scene unfolding before them. He sighed, neither with relief nor with anger. From his adjoining bedroom he heard a gentle stirring of bedsprings under a slight weight and it ignited the spark of reality back into him as he hastily stuffed his suicide note into his pocket and then thought the better of it and tore it into shreds angrily and tossed it out of the already partially ajar window.

Upon opening the door he gasped and flung himself towards the corner where he had tossed his medical supplies a few days ago. His bed was almost full of what looked like a previously very large man who had been whittled away from hunger and was now almost yellow with sickness. His blonde haired head shifted to look at the young black haired man who scurried around helplessly looking for some kind of painkiller. Of course he had none, he hadn't had any for a while and he was down to the last few antibiotics. The larger man didn't have much time left.

"Fritz?" The name sounded alien and obscure but the dark haired, bespectacled man stood upright and turned slowly to meet the gaze of the man in his bed. He shuddered as he remembered how he had looked before, how glorious he had been. His blonde hair now ragged and ruffled with the gooeyness of days of stale sweat had once fallen so wildly around his head, the scorn of his tutors who cursed his untidiness but the awe of all the girls. His great broad shoulders and meaty arms had once been powerful enough to lift Fritz up and flip him over, much to the smaller man's annoyed amusement but they now lay stiff and thin at his sides, as though they were a shadow of their previous form stretched too thin. His once aquiline features were puffed up against the gauntness of his cheeks and his once twinkling brown eyes had fallen gloomy and glassy with hurt and grief. It made every pert of the doctor's body hurt to look at him but nothing more so than his heart which had been so numbed and broken to everything else that the pain of it sent electric shocks of mourning throughout his entire body.

Damn war.

"What is it mein freund?" he purred gently in reply, stepping closer and distractedly fiddling with a needle in his hand that was full of a thin almost-clear liquid. "What is it Hans?" He added as he got close enough to be unable to avoid meeting the gaze of those dull brown orbs, so devoid of life.

"I'm done, Fritz. I'm going to die."

The words hit the young doctor hard and he shook his head violently, this was not the first time he had told him that, but for the first time Fritz felt unable to fully disagree.

"Nein. Sit back. I can help this." He growled protectively, but his hand which was midway to forcing his companion down onto the bed was blocked weakly by a thick, pale arm.

"Ja." He replied, sighing but not breaking the gentleness of his tone. "You can't treat Typhus with what you have. I'm done. It's not your fault…" He shuffled restlessly and found a spot on the bed which hurt less but sent him into a coughing fit. "I heard the soldiers outside. And I heard your cries. You have to leave before they come looking." He managed, though his breathing was raspy and his words came through coughs.

"Nein. I won't leave without you."

"I'm done for." Hans' voice faltered a little and overtones of frustration and anger slipped through the cracks. "I won't have you dying for me, dummkopf." He growled as tenderly as possible, his voice still bold though raspy and weak. He shuddered and brought more of his thin blanket up to his face.

Fritz lowered himself to find a spot on his friend's head to kiss, but he was pushed away angrily.

"And you certainly aren't allowed to catch this. You have enough risk around the others you help..."

"Do you remember when we first met, Hans?" Fritz interrupted, pushing through his rejection and focussing on pleasant memories. He saw the light twinkle in his companion's eyes for a moment before it died and the joviality of that expression made his heart soar for a fleeting moment.

"Of course. I couldn't forget university." His voice was a murmur, his throat thick. "Of course a lot more of us were going to school back then. Now everyone's at war, ja. They were fighting to have me on their courses, ja, they loved us back then." He added, his fists though still clinging to the gloved hands of his companion curling into fists of anger.

Fritz gently eased apart his friends fingers and found his way between them, snaking his gloved fingers through his.

"I liked you, even then when I first saw you." He whispered, gently teasing the hair away from Hans' eyes. "You were just a thin strip of a man then." The two locked eyes and broke into smiles. After a moment, Fritz precariously added, "Don't leave me," which broke the smiles and forced their faces into mournful grimaces.

"I have to. You do know I love you, right?" Hans replied shortly but with a thick syrupy sweetness to his voice. Already the weight of their conversation was driving him back to fitful sleep, and his eyes began to droop steadily, as he failed to maintain focus.

"Ja. I love you too."

It was a few hours before Hans fell into a still silence. A few hours more and the Doctor would find his lover's things shoved into a corner of a wardrobe, along with his horrifying star-of-David armband, which the doctor would burn in a fit of sorrowful anger. A little while after that he would check on Hans, find no pulse and collapse in a heap at his bedside. By the light of the next dawn heavy Nazi hands would force their way into the tiny apartment and find the lonely corpse of a young Jewish boy, his covers pulled up above his face, and there would be no sign of the person who had kept him alive this long. A few days after that, on a half-destroyed bench by the side of a burnt out old café in central Berlin, a rehomed young Medic with a new identity and a new, darker outlook on life would whip a small black book out from his pocket and scribble in the corner,

'I will never love anyone again. The pain is unbearable.'

And some thirty years later, sat curled up in his new room on a new battleground, exhausted and uncharacteristically happy, that same Medic would slide out of his chair and drift into his room. There, laid on his bed he would find the sleeping form of a monolithic man, his giant form shifting the covers up and down over his immense shoulders in time with his breathing. He would circle the sleeping giant and laugh silently as he discovered the copy of a huge Russian-German translation book wedged under his sleeping face, half opened and neglected as he fell asleep. He was trying to translate the words the doctor had crooned as he slipped out of bed to find his abandoned Medic's uniform, leaving his sleeping companion alone to soak in his state of bliss.

"Ich liebe dich, mein Liebhaber." He had purred, the rough accent contrasting harshly with the way he hummed each syllable, denying the Heavy a pause long enough to interrupt. "I've got to go and finish a report now Ivor. Sleep now, I'll be back soon."

The Medic's mind retracted unwillingly and abruptly to the memory of Hans' face. It wounded his heart and his mood that he couldn't recall his face completely, but he remembered he was beautiful. He supposed that was why he was so fond of doves, they were lovely clear white entities, beautiful and haunting as the memory of his lover from all those years ago. He shuddered against the coldness of his own humanity and his mind was drawn to a hundred other visages, scenes and painful commemorations of a haunted, stoic life since then.

It didn't take him long to locate the small, ancient black book tucked like a long lost secret into the back of his night stand and find that note scrawled in fading ink on the back page.

'I will never love again.' It was like a promise written in black ink, a stain on his heart. 'The pain is unbearable.' He brought one hand to his chest and his expression lazily shifted from woeful sorrow to half-contentment. He was lost back then, and he wasn't lost any more. Battle, life, love had saved him and made him stronger, even if it took him almost three decades to find a new reason to go on existing.

He found a pencil stowed away in the same drawer and brought it down to the note. He had to make some alterations. If only he had known what the future held for him, all those years ago. That one day, life wouldn't be endured because he had to continue living, but because he wanted to. That he would find a man he was so captivated by that he would crave waking up beside him each morning and sleep happily each night in Ivor's colossal embrace.

Gingerly he crossed out and added words to the antique note and his eyes fluttered with tears of happiness. He smiled and stroked the new sentence with his finger, like it was the most precious thing on the planet. He snapped the book closed and delivered it back to it's dusty place in the drawer, his heart a little lighter, the weight a little less on his shoulders. The words, simple and painful, reminded him of so much and they were emblazoned on his heart, now, as he found his way into the massive arms of his love, which were so welcoming and warm. Nobody could hurt him here.

'I LOVED YOU, HANS, BUT I WILL love SOMEONE again. The pain HAS TO BE BEARABLE.'

(So there, that's my first ever TF2 fic. J I loved writing it. Do we want any more of my origin idea for the Medic, do we want some other character's origins or shall I leave it there? I kinda have interesting ideas for them all, and plenty more for the Medic, but that was where I wanted to leave this for now. Please review and let me know what you think and if you liked it, as I said, and thank you for getting all the way to the end. :P)


End file.
